


Pit

by enmity



Category: Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu | Legend of the Galactic Heroes
Genre: Abusive Relationships, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 12:56:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17100998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enmity/pseuds/enmity
Summary: She thought of her father and her cousin and her uncle and their shallow graves, and wondered if theirs was an enviable fate.





	Pit

**Author's Note:**

> this ship brings me a lot of nostalgia i'm a bit sad i couldn't make it longer ... but i guess i managed to convey a little bit of my feelings

She couldn’t remember being the kind of girl who cried. She’d cried before, of course. Ten years old and she’d fallen in her uncle’s garden, hands in her face as she mourned her best dress and her father smacked her for whining. Fourteen in her mother’s parlor, when her first engagement had fallen through. The man – his face anonymous in the haze of recollection – had failed to recuperate from an illness.

Twenty-six and crammed with her cousins and aunts and mother’s spirit lingering in her thoughts, flimsy shawl wrapped like a security blanket around her shoulders and looking out the wide glass window turned to the uncaring space as she waited along with her family to have their punishment meted out. Exile. Worked like sheep. The words had sounded less foreign and more like poison when she’d tried running them over her tongue, to listen to them in her own voice. Elfriede leaned her side into the wall and turned her face from her family as she sat. That made it easier to fall asleep.

Eventually the planet came into view, a tiny dot in the distance. By then the initial terror at her fate had crystalized. She flattened her palm onto the window and wondered whether she would be able to move a muscle in her body again without feeling the future come down upon her and force her into a chokehold with all its weight. All its uncertainties, with only despair being the clear endpoint. Her childhood memories frayed and blurred at the edges. She had to remember to breathe.

After that night in his house she didn’t cry. She’d screamed and yelled and she guessed she must’ve struck a chord ( _so your mother hated you how do you like that, huh_ ); counted it as a singular victory in her sea of losses, watched that irrecoverable shining part of herself drift away to the surface and out of grasp as she sat at the bottom. Ruined, now. Like her plans and the knife and the tattered scrap that had once been her future. But she didn’t cry.

She turned on her side and pulled the sheets so she’d stop shivering at the sound of him leaving. The feeling of anticipation, nausea pulling her stomach taut at the prospect that what had happened might happen again – will happen again – was that weakness? She thought of her father and her cousin and her uncle and their shallow graves, and wondered if theirs was an enviable fate.

Thinking of her family proved to be a bad decision. She stilled for a moment, unresponsive, and pretended to be engrossed by the ceiling. Reuenthal touched her on the shoulder and for once she didn’t jump. “Nothing that concerns you,” she told him. But in truth she’d been waiting for the tears to come.


End file.
